Fad’s Army

Some thoughts on Tory proposals to bring back national service.

There have been moments since Wednesday lunchtime, when rumours began flying that Rishi Sunak was about to unexpectedly announce an election, when I felt genuinely worried. I’ve become convinced, this past couple of years, that the Tories were on course for an epoch-defining defeat – had, on my darker days, been sustained by that belief, and had known that I wanted to be here to see hubris meet nemesis, to witness this truly awful government finally getting its comeuppance for everything that it’s done. 

My record of calling election results, though, is frankly not brilliant, so the switch from “likely defeat” to “actually existing election” was slightly unnerving. What if I’d been wrong? What if the polls were wrong? What if Rishi Sunak turned out to be good at this part?

Well. Since deciding to go to the country, the Prime Minister has done the following things:

• Failed to check with his Cabinet, to see if any of them were planning to be out of the country or had to spend a small fortune of public money on private jets;

• Failed to check with his backbenchers, thus meaning the election announcement came preceded by yet more talk of a leadership challenge;

• Failed to check with the weather forecast, to see whether it might be a bad time to make an announcement outside;

• Made a long speech which nobody could hear over the sounds of Things Can Only Get Better, the D:Ream song which provided the soundtrack to Labour's 1997 landslide;

• Asked some Welsh football fans if they’re looking forward to a tournament for which Wales did not qualify;

• Been caught taking low-ball questions from Tory councillors pretending to be regular voters;

• Visited the Titanic Quarter in Belfast, without foreseeing the obvious question;

• Accidentally posed in front of a sign reading “exit” on a plane;

• Been photographed glaring suspiciously at some bread;

• Gone into hiding.

I was actually disappointed by Sunak’s absence on Saturday – I understand why he did it, and it is objectively hilarious that Tory spokespeople had to spend day four of a 44 day election campaign denying that they were having a relaunch, but we’d all been having so much fun it felt unsporting to deprive us. 

But then it turned out they’d just been starving us of small f*ck ups, so that we’d really appreciate a big one. Because at 10pm the Tories announced they were bringing back national service. 

A number of things, quite apart from the fact the Prime Minister had vanished, and also the all-pervading sense of panic, suggest to me that this was done in a hurry. (I almost said “on the back of a fag packet”, but that is of course a place Rishi Sunak would never do anything.) The smallest of these is that the embargoed press release doing the rounds before the announcement, which a friend forwarded to me with the phrase “Jonn they’re actually doing it”, had a number of typos and some severely weird phrasing in it, suggesting they might have skipped some of the usual stages of the policy-making process.

Then there’s the fact that the details appear more than a little sketchy. The term “national service” deliberately implies compulsory military service for 18 year olds. But only a small number would actually be expected to join the forces full-time. (There are 30,000 places, which is less than 5% of the cohort.) Most would instead be allowed to volunteer for one weekend a month, with public services or social care. What those institutions are expected to do with a several hundred thousand surly teenagers who don’t actually want to be there is not entirely clear.

As to whether those who refused would face punishment – something, it must be said, that raises questions about the word “volunteer” – no one seems to know. That possibility was deliberately left open last night, but denied by the Home Secretary this morning. The prisons, it is worth noting, are already so full they’re letting actual criminals out early.

And then there’s the question of how all this would be funded. A Cameron-era initiative named the National Citizens Service, which sounds like the same sort of thing without the khaki, was largely defunded in 2022 by the then Chancellor, whose name, as it happens, was Rishi Sunak. (Word is, he had to be talked out of scrapping it completely.) The new version would be funded by taking £2.5bn away from the already half-hearted levelling up programme on which this government was elected. 

So, to sum up: this new scheme would take money that has been promised to Red Wall seats, and would spend it on forcing residents’ children to work for free, ostensibly filling gaps left by this government’s own incompetence. If they refuse, those teenagers may or may not be punished. Sounds like a game changer, right? Really worth taking a Saturday off the campaign trail for.

National Service is, it’s worth remembering, not remotely popular with anyone under 65. (It was scrapped at the start of the 1960s, so you’d need to be in your 80s to have actually done it the last time around.) It’s not even popular with the army, since it forces that institution to take charge of thousands of untrained kids who obviously don’t want to be there, and also to give them guns.

Some data from YouGov.

So why are they bothering? Because the demographic it is popular with is the same one – in short, reactionary old people – that is currently abandoning the Tories for Reform. This is quite transparently a desperate attempt to stem that bleeding. 

Perhaps this might work: my suspicion is that the reasons that group of voters is abandoning the Tories are probably the same ones every other group of voters is (scandal, incompetence, the state of the economy, the state of public services), and one rushed out policy won’t be enough to change things. But as noted I’m quite often wrong. Perhaps it’ll work.

Even if it does, though, it’ll have the exact opposite effect on large chunks of the rest of the electorate. It gives young people, who vote in low numbers and may lack enthusiasm for Keir Starmer’s Labour, a reason to turn out against the Tories. It gives middle-aged parents on the fence an excuse to do the same. It reminds everyone that the Tories don’t understand that many 18 year olds are already in work, and that the next generation are people with rights of their own, not a demographic that can be pushed around in the desperate search for a viral Facebook ad. It’s entirely possible this announcement does more to consolidate the opposition’s vote than to do the same for the Tories.

Best of all, it’s an enormous “f*ck you” to everyone who lost a large part of their education and formative years to lockdown in an effort to protect their elders from Covid. That in itself strikes me as a very good reason to oppose it. 

Anyway, it took, on Saturday night, less than 20 minutes before this bold new announcement all started, very publicly, to unravel. So all in all, I’m feeling a bit less worried that the Tories will do surprisingly well on the campaign trail than I was.

Housekeeping

You may be a bit surprised to hear from me on a Sunday. Me too.

I am trying, with the help of my trusty factotum Jasper, to work out what to do with this newsletter in the run up to the election. On the one hand, I’d like to be able to respond to the news as it happens a bit more easily than the weekly email allows for, not least because I am, as noted, having quite tremendous fun. On the other, though, I’m aware that a fair chunk of my subscriber base is international and is here for the history/geography/nerd stuff, so I don’t want to be filling their inbox with British politics every 48 hours.

At the moment my instinct is to do a couple of shorter, more frequent emails a week – each perhaps containing one news bit, and one other section – for the duration of the campaign, but I’ve yet to settle on a plan. Thoughts welcome.

If you would like more of this sort of thing, then please do

But if you are someone who has no interest in British politics and has read to the bottom in the hope of finding something here about the Holy Roman Empire or something, then please rest assured: like Rishi Sunak’s political career, it’ll all be over in the first week of July.